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the music of ambient loop guitarist dave stafford and the pureambient microlabel

studio diary 20150214

I had thought that “fair play”, my new “korg gadget” piece, was finished, I did make the odd adjustment here and there, but I thought it had reached its final form, until I sat down to listen to it a few days ago.

the listening session was fine, I am happy enough with the song, “fair play”, as it stands – but, I felt like I wanted to hear more of the “middle section”, which, as it happens, is a key change up to C major, there were only a few bars, so I copied those three bars, inserted them before the existing three bars, and then set about modifying just the Chicago bass / synth (which I am mainly using as a lead synth, not a bass – the hammond has taken the role of the bass for the majority of this track) part so that I had, effectively, three “new” lead lines, and the third, was sort of a very monotonous, circular sort of riff, so I instructed the device to play that bar twice, which gave us this:

so, wonderfully, that means that the “middle eight”, which is a whole tone above the basic song (which appears to be in F or Bb, I am not exactly sure!) is…seven measures long ! I love stuff like that – it makes it odd – but musically, you would probably never notice, it just sounds like a synth “solo”, which is in a different key to the bulk of the song – and it brings musical relief because it jumps up a whole tone – it’s very exciting, it builds tension beautifully…and hopefully, no one is counting bars, and the fact that my middle eight is not, in fact, a middle eight, but a middle seven – will go unnoticed by everyone except; everyone who just read this paragraph. 🙂

we have then, a whole piece of music, at last, that begins (and continues for most of the song, to be honest) in the staggered, drum-driven rhythmic world of gentle giant, moves to some beautiful acoustic v electric piano sections, with a solid and wonderful hammond bass underpinning everything – it then, finally mutates to a seven measure long “middle eight” – (perhaps, I have invented the world’s first “middle seven” – who knows? I’d love to take that credit) and then, via a reprise of the opening segment, moves onto a spectacular ending featuring a four-measure version of the “middle seven” – why not?
So at no point does the “middle eight” ever equal eight bars, it’s seven in the middle of the song (and four when I re-use it at the end) – and I think that is just fine.

“fair play” to me, is a proof positive that the newly-enhanced “korg gadget”, which to be fair, they only added a few instruments, but, the instruments they added are so awesome, that it makes creation with them easy, in fact, with the 15 original synths, you could do a lot, already, but having the core electronic keyboards – well, one is acoustic, I suppose, so having one acoustic and the rest of the core electronic keyboards, to hand – gives us CONTROL…it means you can build songs using those more familiar, more comforting keyboards, and then bring in the 15 original korg synths – the “gadget” originals – to add colour and shade and light and dark…

I basically started this piece out with organ, acoustic piano, drums and electric piano – and that IS the core of the song, and all of those are instruments that are made available in “korg gadget” from “korg module” – which, right away, shows us the real value of “korg gadget” – and that’s just the start – what will it be like when you can access ANY instrument via “korg module”, in high quality samples??

I vote for mellotron, sitar, and anything else they fancy sampling…go for it. I want to see “korg module” become the premier sample based app on ios – unless native instruments jumps in – then, I would have to wait and see what THEY come up with 🙂

I was eager to try “korg gadget” now that it’s been “upgraded” – simply by the existence of “korg module”, that gives “korg gadget” a whole new face, and transforms it into a player of high quality instrument samples – directly parallel (in its basic function, anyway) to kontakt in komplete – we have our world class sample player now – the ubiquitous “korg gadget”.
this is a really clever idea from korg (they seem to be having a lot of really good ideas lately – witness the Ibanez RGKP6 guitar and bass, which feature a korg kaoss pad 2S built right into the guitar’s body – a fantastic idea whose time has finally come – a very clever idea). korg makes really interesting synths and other products, too, and the more I get into their stuff, the more I enjoy it – they have been around the block, they obviously listen to their customers, and, their stuff is well built and long lasting – korg is a name that says “quality” to me.

they seem too, to be able to compete in the world of ios, in the app world, at the same level and with the same commitment to quality that they show in the virtual world, the bricks and mortar world. I like that about a company, and I think that they are handling themselves well in both arenas – not something a lot of companies can probably boast about.

I have listened again now, to the playback of “fair play”, and I am now fairly certain, that it is indeed, complete. I hope I will not change my mind about that again! It’s ended up just about four minutes in length, which for this type of piece, is ideal. I hope to master it and upload it as soon as possible….(update: now done! “fair play” can be found here).

and then…well, things happen 🙂

I was and am totally happy with the completed track, “fair play”…but, while I was doing some final tweaks to levels and stereo placement, it struck me that I’d really like to do two things: I already have finished and mastered “fair play” as it stands, in it’s complete form, but also, I’d like to take it from the point it is at, and do some further work on it, make it an alternate version of itself – so I did a “save as” of the completed “gadget” track, and named it “fair play – advanced version” – and immediately began work on transforming the by-now familiar “fair play” towards new musical areas, I have removed some of the sparser parts, I’ve added more drums, there is far less “space” in this new version, it just rocks straight through rather than having dynamic sections as the original does, and so on.

I’ve also been doing some serious “randomisation” – this is a process that I tend to get into in “korg gadget” especially – where I will lift one melodic pattern, and randomly copy it over a different pattern in a different instrument, so, organ bass part becomes electric piano riff, or acoustic piano now doubles with electric, synth solo becomes hammond solo, and so on…taking existing themes, melodies, and solos and moving them to different places within the composition – it’s huge fun.

I might also decide to just remove four bars of music here, and then, copy two others into their place, remove five bars here, and not replace them, add some of my favourite bars from the first half into the second half, and so on – endless possibility, and it’s very quick, very easy, to edit in korg gadget, too – add extra snare drum hits, add extra bass drum hits, change single hits into double hits – it can all be done so, so quickly – and probably, within the first fifteen minutes of editing, I had radically altered the basic DNA of “fair play” into a completely oddball variation of itself – “fair play – advanced version” – which I plan to work on for a few weeks, to give it roughly as much gestation time as the original got – and then master and upload it as well.

I am very, very glad that korg has jumped into the area of high quality samples for ios, with the beautiful “korg module” app, and I am extremely glad that by chance, they made those samples available to the “korg gadget” app – that, prompted me to re-visit “korg gadget”, and create a song that utilised some of those amazing samples – and I find that it makes a HUGE difference to me, to have hammond organ, acoustic piano, and electric piano as three of the most important samples in my new piece(s) “fair play” and “fair play – advanced version” – which might get re-titled “unfair play” or “fair work” or some such – I don’t know. or…it might just stay as “advanced version” – this remains to be seen.

I have a lot of work to get on with now, I’ve recently recorded a lot of guitar sessions which should hopefully yield some new videos (down the road a piece, probably, but, maybe some interesting takes in this last batch of videos…) as well as a lot of audio mixing to do before I even think about the video side of things – this is always the challenge for me – I am now able to record a lot of material very quickly, but with only myself to handle post-processing, it takes me weeks, or in some cases, years, or in some case, never, to create video content – or sometimes, even process the audio and create master audio mixes.

the backlog is not getting any smaller at the moment, which is actually OK, and what I’ve finally decided is that I will abandon utterly my original intention of trying to present my video work chronologically, I will master and upload what videos I feel are the most important, what videos are the most interesting or unusual, and then, as time permits, I will go back and continue work on the “old” video backlog. controlling this, will be playlists. I’ve already created video playlists, by date, for many of my legacy video sessions so I would suggest that whenever you visit the pureambientHD channel or indeed, any of myvideochannels on youtube, that you always go to the Playlists section, rather than the Uploads – because as of 2015, uploads will no longer be chronological, but completely random – so you will find instead, that in the Playlists section, you will find “dated” dave stafford live music video session in chronological order – and this then frees me to pick and choose between the now, and the historical-that-haven’t-yet-been-processed – so I am recommending that you stick to the chronology as imposed by my “dated” session Playlists – or else, complete and utter confusion may be the main result 🙂 as for me – well, I am chronically chronologically challenged anyway – and confusion, well, it might be my epitaph 🙂 but playlists will get you the unconfused view of dave stafford live music videos.

I really enjoy creating these music videos, and trying out new instruments and techniques, I have never gone in for the “here is my demo of the roland gr-55 guitar synth” and then sit there, and play you ten seconds of each of it’s voices – instead, when I acquired the synth – I just started making videos with it, I just started using it, so you can learn along with me – and I hope that this can, will and might inspire others to pick up some of these interesting instruments, and have a go yourselves – I reckon that it’s easier to learn about something just by trying it – so, for my first ever video, “st. alia of the knife”, I selected the “oboe” voice, set up a nice reverb, ran an existing reverse loop – and did a live oboe solo / improv on video. from there – I just kept working with the synth, until I eventually used it to create my first classical composition, my “concerto no. 1 in em for oboe and guitar” and also, I’ve continued to use it on improvs, as well as part of multi-track recordings such as “this is a test”, as well as the title track, from the “gone native” album, and in fact, I used it on several of the tracks on “gone native” – I really think that the roland gr-55 guitar synth is a great instrument – and I find that all of us who use the device can compare notes and share what we’ve learned via video, audio, and other modes of communication – indeed, why not?

but I digress, this is mainly a report of the now split-into-two “fair play” – and I hope you enjoy the original version while I continue to develop the second version, “fair play – advanced version” 🙂

dave stafford on you tube

you tube channel ablackboxHD
featuring the work of dave stafford – his “anything goes” channel – this is the channel for covers, piano songs, original pop songs, vocal works – “everything else” from dave stafford